Why wasn’t Roland Hanna, a first-rate piano improviser and brilliant accompanist, more famous? Newly unearthed sessions for the IPO Recordings release Colors From a Giant’s Kit, again first-rate, again brilliant, don’t do anything to solve the riddle. You May Also Like: No related posts.

“Surprise” is right: Sounding more like a spiritual and sonic brother to 1990’s fantastic Wrong Way Up, by Brian Eno and John Cale, Surprise hardly sounds like a Simon album at all. And that’s what seemed to have long-time fans scratching their heads — the odd instrumentation and textures, notRead More

You’ll have little difficulty in finding jazz recordings that seek to transform popular songs into standards. That’s been part and parcel of the tradition from the very beginning. More unusual, however, is someone like saxophonist Miguel Zenon, who so personalizes the shopworn idea on Alama Adentro. Each of the tunesRead More

Productive and consistently good are two attributes that don’t usually go together in the record making business, but it’s been John Hiatt’s hallmark for a while, now. You May Also Like: No related posts.